Over at the Green Party of Canada website, meanwhile, environmentally friendly “goods for greens” are for sale. Could we interest you in a $6.89 travel mug, stainless steel and emblazoned with the party logo?

Or maybe your tastes run to Liberal red. In that case, the Liberal Party of Canada “boutique” has some nice aprons for $14.99 or a foam hammer for $4.99.

I’m not sure what one does with foam hammers, but I assume they are less lethal than knives in the back for sorting out the kind of internal feuds that have plagued the Liberals in past decades.

Political parties are not stores, of course, but most of them do sell party swag.

They aren’t part of the government either, even if many of their members do hold public jobs from time to time.

Canada’s political parties exist in a legal grey zone, with a civic purpose and corporate-like activities, such as collecting money and selling merchandise.

That grey zone is becoming increasingly vexing to people who care about privacy in Canada, and what the political parties are doing with all the data they are collecting about voters.

Where did he get the email list? As Postmedia reporter Glen McGregor subsequently discovered, Kenney’s office had “data-mined” a petition sent to his office in 2011 in support of a gay artist in Nicaragua.

Data-mining is the next big frontier in politics, and the Conservatives have been better at it than their rivals in recent years. But any party seriously interested in “micro-targeting” voters, tailoring their messages to specific constituencies, has had to amass the data to do this properly.

Major retailers are doing this, too. If you have an Air Miles card, for example, you may notice that you get coupons from time to time for products you have a history of buying at the grocery or drug store.

But political parties, legally, fall through the cracks. So while government institutions and stores are legally obliged to tell you what data they’ve collected about you — and require your consent to share it with others — political parties, by and large, face no such limits.

So yes, if you buy an apron or mug or hammer from a party store, what’s to stop the parties from keeping your purchasing data on file?

Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is obviously concerned about how political parties are dealing with personal information. Quietly, without much notice, the privacy commissioner’s office seems to be starting to grapple with the legal loophole.

A fascinating study, running to nearly 50 pages, was produced by Colin Bennett, a political scientist at the University of Victoria and consultant Robin Bayley. It is now posted on the privacy commissioner’s website.

It shows just how sophisticated the political parties are capable of being if they’re really interested in getting to know you. For instance, they can (and have in some cases) purchase data lists from Environics Analytics, which breaks down the population into lifestyle “clusters.”

The report takes note of one such cluster, called “Gaybourhoods.”

“Gaybourhoods provide neighbourhood-level data on the propensity of residents to be gay and details the spending potential of the gay population for key categories. Derived from a variety of sources, Gaybourhoods is currently available for the first wave of major metros, including Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver.”

The report, completed and posted long before this week’s dustup over the Kenney email, warns that we’re going to see more and more controversies over how political parties are using our personal information.

“As Canadian parties continue to capture and process personal data, there are likely to be further incidents and media coverage of data breaches, non-consensual use and disclosure of personal information and unsolicited marketing practices,” Bennett and Bayley state.

No one should be too surprised, then, if Stoddart begins to turn her attention to Canada’s big political parties and the grey zone of privacy they now inhabit.

And, after a few more unsolicited, mass emails from the politicians, Canadians may demand some action.

Susan Delacourt is a member of the Star’s Ottawa bureau.

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